We are encouraging authors to submit manuscripts electronically, and in turn encouraging our editors and reviewers to accept manuscripts electronically. Appropriately formatted electronic documents travel rapidly and reliably from authors to the journal, and from the journal to reviewers. In many cases, the same cannot be said of regular postal mail. Moreover, electronic submission assists the Journal in record-keeping, reduces costs, and may save paper.
However, there are some matters to consider in preparing electronic submissions. By far, the most notable concern is due to differences in fonts (phonetic fonts are particularly a problem for this journal). In general a word processing document such as a file produced by Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, FrameMaker, etc. can only be accurately reproduced on computers that share the same fonts and printers as the system on which the document was originally written. Aditionally, there are a large number of wordprocessing programs available to authors around the world that produce documents in formats that cannot be read by other wordprocessing programs. Because of the many potential incompatabilities, it is impossible to ensure that a document printed or viewed by editors and reviewers will look exactly like the document intended by the author. Thus, the Journal will not be able to accept word processing documents in most cases [Note 1]. However, PostScript, and to an even greater extent, PDF formatted documents preserve the image of a document as authors intend it to appear. For this reason, we will normally require either PDF or PostScript documents for electronic submission [Note 2].
To assist authors in preparing documents in these formats, some simple notes on creating PostScript and PDF documents for Windows systems follow.
In Windows-95/98/NT/2000 systems, PostScript documents can be created by selecting a PostScript printer in the printer dialog box and checking the option to "Print to File." Although a file created this way is PostScript, MS Word (and possibly other applications as well) insists on giving the file a .prn extension. You may change the extension to .ps if you wish, but this is not necessary. PostScript files can to emailed to (and viewed/printed by) anyone with access to a PostScript printer or interpreter such as GhostView (see below).
Even if you do not have a postscript printer, you can still install one in the Windows Printer folder although you will only be able to use it to print to a file. That file will be postscript (but it will still have the .prn extension). If you want to do this, go to the "My Computer/Printers" folder and double click "Add Printer" then follow the instructions. We recommend the HP LaserJet 4Si/4SiMX PS printer. You will probably be asked to insert the Windows CD-ROM to complete the installation. Of course, in many cases you can (or even must) ask your local systems administrator to do this for you.
On some systems, PDF documents are created by printing from a word processor program to a "dummy printer" that outputs a PDF file instead of hardcopy. The Acrobat Exchange program is of this sort. On many other systems, however, PDF files are created by first generating a PostScript file (see above) and then passing the PostScript through a converter program to produce PDF. There is a free (GNU-licensed) package for Windows 95/98/NT and several forms of Unix called GhostView which contains software for viewing postscript files and for converting PostScript files to PDF documents. You may download a copy of the Windows version of the package if you would like to install and try it. PDF files can be viewed and printed using the freely available Acrobat software from Adobe. PDF documents are also much smaller than the PostScript documents from which they are generated.